Clive Cowdery today announced that he will float his financial services restructuring firm Resolution on the stock market this year, raising at least £1billion to fund new take­overs and deals.

In a major coup, Cowdery also revealed that former Financial Services Authority chief executive John Tiner had agreed to become chief executive and former HBOS director Phil Hodkinson was joining the team as an executive director.

Cowdery returned £4.9billion to Resolution's original backers earlier this year after selling the collection of closed life funds he had acquired to Hugh Osmond's Pearl and Royal London.

Now he wants to raise funds and is extending his targets for restructuring to include not just life funds and fund managers but also banks and reinsurance and general insurance.

He has refused to rule out bidding for the £3billion Friends Provident, but other targets could include medium-sized banks and fund managers and other credit-based firms.

"After the sale we went away for the summer to do some deep thinking," Cowdery said.

"We have identified opportunities in all four areas and believe that we will need at least £5billion of equity to carry out our plans. But we will ask for £1billion first and then come back to our shareholders for more cash and their approval with each deal we do."

He added that "2008 was a good year to be out of the market but 2009 feels like a good time to be coming back".

"We are not a private equity firm that simply buys assets because it thinks they are undervalued. We buy assets and work on them to create more value. That can take six, 12 or 18 months at least."

Tiner, whose previous role gives him one of the deepest insights into the workings of the City, explained: "We believe that the boards of companies in the financial services sector are changing from simple survival planning, which they have had to do of late, to thinkiing about where they go in the future."

Resolution, Cowdery said, has three main levers it can use to add value. They are: consolidation, as he did in the life funds sector, deconsolidation, when groups have become too complex or unwieldy; and working alongside existing management to create value through demergers, sales and restructuring.

Tiner, 51, met Cowdery in 2003 when he outlined for the closed life fund sector to the then chief executive of the FSA.

"It was a meeting of minds even if we had ultimately different objectives," Tiner said.

"We both knew a sector which was going nowhere had to be unlocked. Now we can see the opportunity to restructure businesses more broadly across the financial services sector."

Hodkinson, 50, left HBOS in April having been made finance director when Mark Tucker returned to run Prudential in 2005.

Regulator who went for pragmatism

John Tiner, 51, first came to prominence as head of the Bank of England's review of UK banking supervision in 1996, following the collapse of Barings Bank.

Though he was then head of Arthur Andersen's worldwide financial services practice he seemed destined for regulation. He joined the FSA in 2001 and became its chief executive two years later.

On his watch the FSA had the debacle of split-level investment trusts and a spate of insider dealing rows, but Tiner is generally credited with moving from rule-based regulation into a more pragmatic use of principles.

Having fought off prostate cancer three years ago he stepped down from the FSA in July of last year.

Married with three children, Tiner is a gregarious even chatty financier.

He is also a sports nut supporting Leeds United and a keen tennis player and sailor.